The YSD Three

The news has gotten around in other ways, but I just received the official press release for the three Yale School of Drama productions this season. These are the thesis projects for the three students in the School’s directing program. They also serve as showcase for the directors’ classmates in the acting, design and management programs. The directors choose the scripts they wish to direct, with their professors’ approval mainly hinging on whether the necessary resources are available. Usually they are—these are grand-scale, well-funded productions that often provide the launching points for careers. It’s a good place for students to try their dream projects, scripts they may never get a chance to stage at other theaters.

Casting hasn’t been announced yet, but the directors this year should provide their own surge of interest. This has been a particularly creative, experimentally minded clas, as evidenced by the works these directors have done at the Yale Cabaret in recent semesters.

Here’s the line-up:

Oct. 25-29: Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Actually the libretto for an uncomposed opera, Stein’s 1938 script is generally presented as a stand-alone play. Connecticut was special place for Stein: her Four Saints in Three Acts had a spectacular world premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford; her good friend Thornton Wilder lived in Hamden; and (encouraged by Wilder and by the novelist/critic Carl Van Vechten) donated her papers to Yale in the 1940s.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is the ensemble-friendly director behind one of my favorite Yale Cabaret shows of the past few seasons, a multi-media deconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Dec. 10-16: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by Louisa Proske. How often do you get to see a Cymbeline? Proske did a better-known, and funnier, though no less romantic, play of the bard’s—As You Like It—this past summer for the Yale Summer Cabaret.

Jan. 24-28: Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Alexandru Mihail. Again, Yale Cabaret audiences have already gotten a taste of what they might expect from a Yale School of Drama production. Mihail did the extraordinary, audience-interactive expansion of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception at the Cabaret last spring. As with The Wedding Reception, for his Seagull Mihail’s using a translation by the late great Paul Schmidt, who not channeled the voice of Chekhov like few others ever could, but had his own history of working with open-minded experimental companies and directors.

The Drama School’s had Chekhovs aplenty, but no Seagull is like another, and with all the play’s theater in-jokes, students flock to it like, well, birds.

Tickets for the Yale School of Drama shows are already on sale at drama.yale.edu, or at (203) 432-1234, and even at the Yale Rep box office.